Competition | 1 August 2009

In Competition No. 2606 you were invited to imagine Gordon Brown taking some tips on style from a writer of your choice and submit an extract from the resulting speech.

I thought more competitors might have steered the Prime Minister in the direction of Milton or Dryden, given their spin-doctoring credentials. As it was, Shakespeare was the most popular mentor. Drawing on a more modern influence, Basil Ransome-Davies chose as the PM’s template ‘Spain’, Auden’s ‘dishonest’ poem, rhetorically powerful but morally bankrupt — which struck me as appropriate to the times we live in. Thanks to Susan Therkelsen and D.A. Prince for conjuring up the image of Gordon Brown, dub-poet-in-training, channelling Benjamin Zephaniah. One to savour. The winners, printed below, get £25 each. The bonus fiver is Alan Millard’s.

I give you, voters, this dream. Hush. Only you can
    hear
the come-to-heel, Bercowian barks above the dog-
    yelping,
cat-calling, ding-donging Common’s cacophony;
only you can hear the silk-soft, pussy-purring snores
of the ermine-swaddled, mollycoddled Lords in the
    House
next door.